Verde Terrace

Datpiff.com; 2011

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Years from now, we might look back and try to pinpoint exactly when Curren$y became one of the best rappers working, and wonder how we missed it at the time. Since his 2010 breakout Pilot Talk, the New Orleans rapper has reliably released a high-quality new mixtape or full-length album every couple of months, but he's remained perplexingly easy to overlook: as befits a rapper heavily indebted to weed culture, he seems less young-and-hungry and more like the guy who was always just around somehow. Committed, in a noncommittal sort of way.

But don't let the hangdog pose fool you: it takes ferocious inner steel to put out this much consistently good music in so little time, and the fact that he's done so without disrupting the heavy-lidded calm of his pose only makes it more impressive. His latest release, the DJ Drama mixtape Verde Terrace, isn't his best work this year, or even in the last six months: that would be last June's Weekend at Burnie's. Like many recent DJ Drama mixtapes, it sags beneath some lazy or obvious beat selections. The boilerplate, rushed-feeling song titles reflect minutes of thought: "My Life is a Movie", "Run Dat Shit", "High Tunes". It contains the world's most unnecessary remake of Biggie's "Ten Crack Commandments", delivered entirely by Curren$y's Russian-doll miniature sidekick Young Roddy.

And yet Curren$y has burnished his star to such a warm, hazy glow that whenever he appears on it, things snap immediately into focus. His weed talk has grown so metaphorically florid that it's entered its own realm: If you're a rapper who writes about getting high and you hear Curren$y say he gets "lifted like sanctions," how do you even begin to respond? His puns and double entendres continue to boast sneaky layers, à la "She puts the phone in her lap and when I call she comin'." Verde Terrace boasts fewer of these quotables than recent performances, but he still proves he can spin your head with startling ease a dozen or more times.

Indeed, what often gets shortchanged in Curren$y's "weed rapper" label is the compelling slipperiness of his mind: "Nonchalant, but I'm very aware of what's going on," he assures us on "Pinifarina". His default mode is "easily unimpressed," an attitude surely honed from doing time in shifting rap regimes from No Limit to Cash Money. "I'm from New Orleans, I stunt/ In a blue moon once... But I don't be doin' too much," he raps on "Ways to Kill Em", a side-note observation that indicates the warily careful philosophy behind the bored facade: keep your head down, keep rapping.

Verde Terrace doesn't break any new territory for Curren$y, but "new territory" isn't really part of his M.O.-- he is digging a groove, one into which he settles more comfortably each year. It's a technique he might have soaked up from his one-time mentor Lil Wayne, who chased the same six metaphors single-mindedly until they yielded delirium. Like Wayne, Curren$y is refining the contours of his tiny universe so that it resembles no one else's. The point is driven home on Verde Terrace's outro "Smoke Sum n", when Wayne appears for a guest verse. It's the first time the two have collaborated since parting ways four years ago, and the ships-passing-in-the-night moment is telling: Wayne very much sounds like a visitor in Curren$y's territory now. And Curren$y sounds like no one's idea of a sidekick.